Comment by saagarjha
6 months ago
Stallman has historically done pretty poorly at getting people involved in the free software movement. Before someone goes "surely you are talking about women and other underrepresented groups" no I am not talking about them, although that is also important of course. I'm talking about the people who are not hackers, the people who are stuck using Microsoft Office at their job but want to know about better options, the people who want their computer to not suddenly update and sell them ads but couldn't name a single programming language. Stallman has really dropped the ball for those people. I used to think he was quirky and principled too and I value his contributions but when I zoom out I've stopped finding that he's able to campaign for change effectively. Maybe he was qualified in 1980 but in a world where everyone has a phone in their pocket that is not only proprietary but that they can only really interact with as an appliance, perhaps he is not the most qualified person anymore.
Even if Stallman had only given given us Emacs and we ignored everything else he has ever done, he'd still have given us more and brought more people involved in free software than this new crop of MBA/communications degree CEOs that has taken over ever will.
We need more Torvalds and Van Rossums and Kawaguchis than Stallmans.
Not really. Without Stallman, there would be no Torvalds.
After Stallman launched the GNU project, the emergence of GNU licensed kernel for x86 architecture was inevitable. It just happened that Linux became that kernel. Had it not, the GNU project folks led by rms would have inevitably made their own.
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